The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics by Ramzi Fawaz (NYU Press 2016) looks like the kind of book I would instantly grab off the shelf, or maybe even get as a gift from my loved ones who are often confused by my obsession with comics, but support it enthusiastically. Billed as an investigation of post-World War II superhero comics through the lens of Fawaz’s background in gender studies and queer theory, it has a striking cover and enticing blurbs from Junot Díaz. Sadly, the book does not deliver on all that promise.

Fawaz has the poor luck of his book finding its way into the hands of someone who is both very knowledgeable about the subject he’s tackling, and also very cynical about both the comics industry and midcentury America. I went to grad school with the intent of writing my thesis on Batman, in particular Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and the shift towards anti-heroes that happened in the 1980s and ‘90s. These days I concentrate more on the state of the industry as it is, but I’ve got a lot of backstory, which at first made me excited to tackle this meaty book.

Like many other academics, Fawaz relies far too heavily on field-specific jargon. Even as someone with a background in anthropology and the kind of literature analysis he’s doing, I found myself in turns bored and frustrated by the text, bogged down in redefined terminology and portmanteaus that have no meaning outside of Fawaz’s specific field of study. If I didn’t already have experience reading this kind of text and profound enthusiasm for the subject, I would have probably abandoned the effort before I finished the introduction.

Even beyond writing that would be impenetrable to casual fans, Fawaz’s academic leanings cause other issues. As is the case with many similar texts, his area of research and speciality has done him a huge disservice here: while he flirts with the idea of discussing geopolitical or racial issues during his analysis, Fawaz always shies away quickly, retreating to analysis that is so narrowly focused on gender and queer theory as to be blinded to all other possibilities. Though examples of this arrive on nearly every page, two in particular stand out.

In recounting when the Fantastic Four first meet Black Panther, he doesn’t recognize that the final pages of the book, where T’Challa considers abandoning his superhero persona now that his main foe has been defeated, has profound racial implications. That T’Challa could only beat his foe with the help of four white people isn’t touched on at all; the fact that T’Challa changes his mind and stays the Black Panther only because his new white friends encourage him is similarly ignored.

Perhaps even more ridiculously, Fawaz describes Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk as one that feminizes him, since the shift is caused by a loss of control over emotions, which is a female trait. There’s no discussion at all of the fact that the Hulk could more easily be seen as a coded “savage,” the result of what happens when a white man loses his education and control of himself, he becomes massive and musclebound, a literal person of color (originally gray, not green) in a way that taps into white fears of particularly black men.

Fawaz also uses language that is at best outdated or problematic and at worst phobic without any discussion or explanation. While explaining a Justice League of America story that features children with disabilities, he uses ableist language, not while quoting the comic or other texts, but in his own analysis. He repeatedly uses trans bodies as objects and compares the transformation of all four members of the Fantastic Four to actual trans people, likening the mutations from space radiation to the genuine need to be in a body that represents one’s internal self. Gender is only ever discussed as a binary and Fawaz often lumps homosexuality and femininity together without context or examination.

What really weakens the book as a whole is Fawaz’s lackadaisical approach to the difference between authorial intent and impact. Stan Lee is featured repeatedly as a staunch liberal, a stand up guy who replied to letters from his fans and always upheld the ideals of human equality. Meanwhile, he’s known for cutting his collaborators out of history and generally being difficult to work with.

Fawaz frequently extols the liberal ideals of comics creators, occasionally admitting that they had to make money, and uses characters from the Justice League and Fantastic Four and the X-Men to demonstrate how inclusive they were of minorities, how “queer” and non-normative they were. But none of these characters are explicitly queer, and there was a clear limit to the number and type of women who were allowed to be in these teams. People of color and people with disabilities need not apply.

Ignoring this default of exclusively white and straight, almost always male characters undercuts all of his arguments, Fawaz has some intriguing ideas that are invalidated by this constant reminder that he thinks that Ben Grimm (the Thing) is “queer” because he is androgynous and of dubious ethnic origin simply because he does not appear explicitly male and white. There’s no mention of the fact that, while they may have espoused liberal ideals of human equality, the creators of these books were just as white, straight, and male as their characters. Particularly insulting is the idea that Sue Storm has “agency” of her own, ignoring that she is a woman being written by men, subjecting her to the male gaze not because she wants to play with gendered expectations, but because they are men who are drawing and writing her that way.

The idea that a fictional character has any sort of say in their behavior is laughable at best, and in the case of justifying the actions of a minority character written by white men, particularly egregious.

Fawaz idolizes Lee and his colleagues in almost the exact same way the Beats are often idolized, without examination or criticism. Both the Beats and these creators are reified for “queering” America, making it think beyond the heteronormative nuclear family towards a new equality of man based on intellect, all while erasing the women, people of color, and plenty of actual queer people from their movement. In this way, success is only defined by “intellectual” white men, and any noncompliance is punished with erasure and replacement with a more acceptable version of “queer.”

The final nail in the coffin for me came on page 9, far too early in the book. In writing “…DC Comics (creator of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and Marvel (creator of Captain America)…” Fawaz shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how the industry works and what individual actions may have meant.

DC and Marvel did not create these characters, instead they own the trademarks for them. The characters were created by people who sold their intellectual property to these publishers, who continue to own it in perpetuity.

In an age where we’re fighting to make sure artists get the recognition they deserve, so soon after Bill Finger finally got credited for co-creating Batman with Bob Kane, the fact that Fawaz can’t keep this straight didn’t bode well for the rest of his book, and my instincts turned out to be correct. This book is proof that, while academia may finally be embracing the serious study of comic books as a legitimate and worthwhile effort, more knowledgeable editors and writers to are needed to tackle thorny, complicated issues.

Bottom line: do not recommend, not even if you can get it for free from the library. Go read The Ten-Cent Plague or Comic Book Nation or The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay instead. Better yet, go buy a comic in your local comic shop. Support small publishers. Write a letter to the creators of your favorite comic to let them know

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Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us epitomizes the central ideological premise of much of games journalism today–in both the good and the bad ways. Goldberg gets his facts right, but the book is ultimately an homage to a strange kind of cult-of-the-genius that permeates games, a tendency of both journalists and fans to hero-worship the “giants of the industry” in blatant disregard of the fact that games (like movies) are made by teams of dozens to hundreds of people.

At its core, All Your Base is a history of the personalities behind videogames, despite the subtitle’s claim that it will tell us “How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture.” With a subtitle like that, I fully expected to read about how pop culture itself was transformed by the arrival of interactive entertainment and user-generated narratives. I thought the book would talk about the rise of videogames as a cultural phenomenon which transformed the way we think and interact with both technology and one another.

It isn’t. At all.

All Your Base is a who’s-who of videogames pioneers, and, as such, is an interesting artifact which charts the important people whose ideas transformed the industry, if not the genre, from the 1950s all the way up to the early 2000s. Goldberg pinpoints games which revolutionized the genre, yes, but he does so less in terms of ideological transformations and more in terms of individual decisions.

For example, Goldberg looks at Roberta Williams, the narrative intellect behind the King’s Quest series, and her husband Ken, who did most of the initial programming for the early Sierra games. Although Goldberg does a little gendered pandering to our sympathies by framing the chapter in terms of Roberta crying under the covers (which did annoy me quite a bit), he also makes the very salient point that she is one of the most influential people–not just women–in gaming’s history, and that we all-too-often fail to recognize that precisely because she is a woman. I also did not, for what it’s worth, appreciate his remark that “sadly, no woman since Roberta has had such a long-running impact on games and on game companies. Decades later, Sierra still represents the high point for women in videogames” (158).

I think we could have done without that.

I suppose I’m also having trouble with the overall hero-worship attitude of the book, which frames most of the developers featured therein as men (and Roberta) working at the edge of a wild digital frontier, great heroes in the scope of Daniel Boone or Natty Bumppo who had inspirational ideas which appear to have been visited upon them from some sort of cyber-deity and could never be had by mere mortals like us. This is an attitude I have witnessed both first-hand and online from fans, particularly those who all-but-grovel before the shadows of Great Men like Peter Molyneux or Ken Levine. Goldberg is particularly laudatory of Levine, whom he characterizes as an artist fighting to defend the ideas of his beleaguered creative staff.

I can’t help but call shenanigans on the whole concept of the cult of the genius that has, in general, not just in All Your Base, become central to games journalism and fandom. The men and women–yes, women, plural–who work in the games industry are ALL doing a lot of very hard, very good work. Games like BioShock are the product of thousands of hours put in by hundreds of people–it did not spring, fully-formed, out of Levine’s head. Certainly, it would not have been what it was without Levine’s steering, and, as such, he absolutely deserves credit, but to focus on individuals (Levine or any of the other examples in All Your Base) is to ignore the inherently collaborative nature of the genre.

For what it is–a collective biography of a collection of innovators in the industry–All Your Base is a smooth-reading narrative of the people who catalyzed most of the major genre-shifts in gaming. What it is not is a history of how games changed pop culture. It is non-critical, non-theoretical, but still interesting, if you can (unlike me) get over its hero-worship.

Summary: All Your Base is not a critical history of games so much as it is a biographical history of the most influential people in gaming from the 1950s to about 2010. If you are interested in success stories and videogames, it’s an interesting read, but it doesn’t really provide a good history of the games themselves.

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Anthea Kraut’s Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford 2016) is an essential entry to the growing field of critical intellectual property studies. Kraut delves into the complex issues surrounding the granting (or not) of rights in dance in the United States, taking a complex historical view of the issue, delving into how power dynamics played a role in the judgment of the lines of protection, with the “dancer’s positions in a raced, gendered, and classed hierarchy, and on the historical conditions in which they made, and made claims on, on their dances.”

This is a readable academic book – and it gets the descriptions of law, both statutory and case law, right. Rather than damning with faint praise, this is a big deal, considering how often I read about legal disputes by those that are not law-trained and they get it so wrong. Kraut’s skill to blend together legal and dance descriptions manages to use words to describe dance and why those dances were at issue. I do wish that there was a companion site – even YouTube links to better see the steps described, rather than reliance on reading-based visualization.

The book delves into the Catch-22 that African-American creativity has frequently dealt with in the face of the limits of copyright protection, where copyright protects just enough to exclude certain creators and creativity, where white performers copied from Black performers, yet

“Under a racist power structure, these white performers invariably received top billing and greater remuneration than the African American performers from whom they borrowed. Record executives, meanwhile, routinely cheated black talent out of royalties. [Alberta] Hunter received her first copyright in 1922 for “Down Hearted Blues,” her most successful song[.] Yet for years, [she received no royalty payments]. … Without the (rhetorical) stamp of copyright to authorize Hunter’s version as an original, [one person’s] claim to be the inventor and exclusive exhibitor of the Black Bottom[, a vernacular African-American dance,] was capable of steamrolling evidence to the contrary. Asserting collective authorship was not enough for the law; a work had to be individually authored to qualify as intellectual property. Even unsubstantiated, Hunter’s copyright claim should thus be seen as a weapon against and check on white hegemony in the theatrical marketplace.” (148-49)

Kraut makes sure to remind the reader that the book is a series of case studies; because there isn’t much litigation in this area, it is difficult to draw the circles of influence too broadly. Every case study has interesting information about the state of the law: a dance dispute moving in the interstitial space between copyright and patent law: Fuller v. Gilmore, 121 F. 129 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1902); the reliance on the traditional dances of East Indians to create the early exotic dances by white women in the U.S.; how “’stealing’ []constituted a primary mode of learning and choreographic innovation for black vernacular dancers—a far cry from copyright law’s ideology of exclusive ownership” (137); how little even a famous choreographer like Agnes de Mille was paid for her groundbreaking choreography for Oklahoma! (199-200); how one striptease routine was denied copyright; and about the blending together of copyright and post-death rights-of-publicity-lite.

Favorite quote: “The threat of getting ‘whipped up’ and ‘tromped’ by a group of dancers must have carried at least as urgent a force as law.” (141)

The chapter on Johnny Hudgins, a Black blackface performer who both argued for the uniqueness and copyrightability of his dances – as well as the complete opposite, reminded me of the swirling storm of lawsuits regarding the unique sound of George Clinton and P-Funk. This case was considered historic in the Black press, where “the fact that a black performer’s originality was being adjudicated at all was something of a coup.” (107) Kraut doesn’t shirk away from making bold statements like: “the relationship between the original and the copy in American performance is [] haunted by the legacy of slavery and its cultural corollary, minstrelsy.” (98). It would be enlightening to have Kraut collaborate with a music scholar to delve into the twists and turns creative artists take to protect or declaim their work during various part of their careers, especially with her brief mention of the work-for-hire doctrine in copyright law and the contract disputes frequently at issue for performers.

The book does touch on the present, with mentions of the Fair Use Best Practices for Dance by the Dance Heritage Coalition. However, this section is the only disappointment, perhaps due to its clinginess to relevance, with its focus on Beyoncé. Beyoncé’s career is far from its end; talking about one aspect of her problematic connection to borrowing/copyright seems half-finished. The earlier sections of the book were able to successfully engage with how copyright potentially influenced the entire careers of dancers – and in the case of Martha Graham, her “afterlife” in her dances owned by her namesake studio.

The idea that the input of women, people of color, and specifically the work of women of color in the construction and application of copyright law isn’t surprising, but it is so rarely written about in mainstream law-related publications. The issues covered by Kraut are surprising that they haven’t been covered before – but yet not surprising. Even looking at law review articles before the internet age (so before 1990), there were less than two dozen articles that focused on the possibility of copyright in choreography – and the first law review article from a similar perspective from Kraut appears to be this one (which does cite Kraut’s earlier work) – from 2012: Caroline Joan S. Picart, ATango between Copyright and Choreography: Whiteness as Status Property in Balanchine’s Ballets, Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Graham’s Modern Dances, 18 Cardozo J.L. & Gender 685 (2012). Kraut cites Picart and another legal scholar, Julie Van Camp, in her background section, as the two scholars who “attempted to create a bridge between dance studies and legal scholarship on copyright.” (37)

Considering Kraut doesn’t write from the perspective of a law-trained person, the extreme dearth of similar publications from those that are is stark – there are multiple articles on the copyright of comedy or magic (or cooking or tattoos), but somehow the complex history of dance copyright escapes much notice. But this is true for other performative elements outside of the high culture white straight male mainstream (with the exception of roller derby names and flash mobs (and fashion is both in and out of these circles)): the only U.S. published law review article on the intellectual property rights in or not in drag performance specifically focuses on Israeli drag! Eden Sarid, Don’t Be a Drag, Just Be a Queen – How Drag Queens Protect Their Intellectual Property without Law, 10 FIU L. Rev. 133 (2014) .

While present indigenous rights are a hot subject in intellectual property study, thinking and studying about how we got to here within the United States regarding cultures that have had their power to control “intellectual property rights” stripped over time as part of general disempowerment efforts, specifically African-Americans and Native Americans/First Peoples also need to be told. We’ve read and seen much on what happens when borrowing and parody culture bumps into permissions and control culture surrounding hip-hop and other forms of culture bubbling up from the African-American experience, primarily focused on Campbell v. Acuff-Rose. Kraut expands this universe of complex dynamics complicating our understanding of the bounds of copyright to reflect on dance, and I commend her skill and time commitment to do this story justice. I hope to read many more books and articles on these contested areas on the boundary lines of intellectual property law.

Summary: Highly recommended for its excellent historicalizing of copyright’s view of dance in the U.S. Would be great in use in classes focusing on I.P. history, copyright law, critical intellectual property, American history, cultural studies, and more.

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Michael Fuhr’s Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding out K-pop (2016) is an very important addition to the growing field of K-pop studies. Thankfully, Fuhr’s book is both an academic and highly readable take on what makes kpop itself – including government sponsorship, the music structure, the training process, the visuals, and more. This book demonstrates what a timely and exhaustive snapshot of k-pop can look like, and why answering the question about the popularity of -kpop is such a complex one.

Fuhr is definitely a completist when it comes to giving readers an understanding of how k-pop became popular – ranging from marketing, to the music itself, to specific kp-op fandom traditions. I especially appreciated the discussions of the influence of non-Korean elements in k-pop (such as the same Scandanavian pop writers that write in English) and the specific Korean tradition of “fracturing the album concept” – allowing for mini-albums, EPs and album re-packages, with additional singles.

Fuhr also gets into the details of the process for trainees on the road to idoldom, such as the competitions/auditions in multiple categories: singing, dancing, look, acting, songwriting, humor, and modelling. And how trainees are trained (as least by SM) in the dance styles of jazz, hip-hop, sexy hip-hop, and popping. (78-81)

This book also doesn’t hold back when discussing the underlying difficulties of supporting a squeaky clean music market on the backs of those who enter the marketplace when still children:

“The question of whether the K-Pop industry benefits from unfair contracts, teenage exploitation, and violation of basic human rights has emerged as a serious subject in public debates shedding light on the disastrous financial situation of artists and on suspect working conditions in the pop idol industry. Exclusive long-term contracts over more than ten years, tight schedules for performances and events, unpaid wages and inappropriate compensation, control over private life, child labor, and sexualization of teenage idols were among the most debated problems that asked for adequate political and legal regulation.” (77)

The most valuable aspect of this book – from the perspective of someone who reads every academic book on Korean pop in English – is the detailed discussion of musical song structure for K-pop songs, considering this is the first book to do so.

Fuhr’s musicology discussion explains in detail what makes the sound of k-pop specifically sound like kpop. He discusses the importance of the hook song form and hooks specifically, the flow-oriented song structure, the climax-oriented song structure, the breaking-the-flow song structure, and the importance of both the rap bridge and ballads to K-Pop. One of the most unique elements of the book are musical breakdowns and discussions of popular K-pop songs including TVXQ’s Rising Sun, Brown Eyed Girls’ Abracadabra, and Super Junior’s Sorry Sorry.

He elucidates that the “timely coincidence between the burgeoning of hook songs in K-pop and K-pop’s international acceptance beyond Asian countries may further suggest the specific (i.e., extremely repetitive and disrupted) formal structure of hook songs contributes to K-Pop’s attractiveness to young listeners across continents.” (90)

I also want to note that in addition to all of this above, Fuhr also manages to discuss government support for kpop, the nationalism that swirls around k-pop, anti-fans, and the controversial pushes to market BoA and Wonder Girls to English-speaking markets (read: Americans who can only handle music in English).

Any negatives? Not really, unless I want to be super picky – and mention how there isn’t discussion of law, beyond a mention of waiving copyright (which isn’t how it works). But that is like critiquing the marzipan leaves on an excellent cake – this book is such a good academic overview of k-pop! I look forward to reading more from Fuhr.

Summary: Highly recommended for researchers or libraries with a strong interest in musicology, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, popular culture, Korea studies, or Asian studies. The specific focus on the music structure of K-pop in this book truly makes it unique from its peers – and its practical description of K-pop music, videos, and business aspects makes it eminently quotable. Other books are better for a focus specifically on fandom elements of k-pop, but the breath of the topics here makes up for it, unless fandom is the only area of interest.

However, this book is quite pricy in hardcover, so that format suggested for purchase only for serious individual researchers (try e-book). Suggested purchase in any format definitely for libraries with collections in musicology, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, popular culture, Korean studies, or Asian studies.